Total Solar Eclipse 22 July 2009

There will be a total solar eclipse on 22 July 2009, mostly visible from India, China and the western Pacific Ocean. This will be the longest total solar eclipse this century and is the next in the Saros 136 series, following the eclipses of 1937, 1955, 1973 and 1991. Here is a short documentary about it.

Neptune's Return in 2009 - Part IV

Part IV of this series has been a long time coming - because it took longer to produce!

The Neptune Return in 2009 – Part III

Aquarius is a sign that, among other things, is representative of the commons, that is those things that we all share and which we feel should be beyond property rights. This is because Aquarius is symbolic of the group purpose, and is concerned with what can foster fellowship and collective motives. Around the time of its discovery in 1846, Marx was developing his ideas of the collective responsibility, and right, to allocate the shares of labour and capital according to collective need. With Neptune conjunct Saturn at this time, we can see how, in the decades following, the idealistic vision of socialism attempted to share out the burdens of labour, the pains of wealth creation and the struggles of penury, as though such necessary difficulty was really a part of the commons.

Of course there was a major problem with the actual attempts to manifest this vision, as can be readily observed in the history of Stalinist Russia, the severe repression in Maoist China and the ultimate failure of communism and a centrally planned economy to meet people’s needs. Why did it fail? Whole books have been written in answer to such a question, but here I would like to suggest one theme, related to Neptune’s placement in Aquarius. Inherent in visions of the socialist utopia is an assumption of equality amongst individual members of society; everyone contributes labour, and everyone reaps a reward. As Marx said ‘from each according to his capacity, to each according to his need.’ And in some very basic ways it is true that individuals are equal. Everyone counts as one in a census; everyone gets one vote in a democratic election (except children), and everyone has a right to life (except people sentenced to capital punishment). But in other fundamental ways, they are quite unequal. Some people are successful athletes, some people are talented playwrights, some people are disabled from birth and some people are untrustworthy scoundrels. In communist societies it was common for talented university academics, with clearly superior skills in a particular research field, to be forced to work in mines or as cleaners, whereas well-paid positions in the governing bureaucracy were given to individuals with little native talent or educational achievement. This, of course, while attempting to achieve as homogenous a society as possible in terms of the balance of labour and reward, simply resulted in mass depression, resentment, misallocation of resources and gross inefficiency as the spark of individual creativity was snuffed out on the altar of ideological conformity. Neptune’s solvent, while in Aquarius, is the ultimate liberation of being freed from social expectation based on accident of birth, gender, nationality, clan or calling. It is the bliss of total freedom to direct one’s life according to one’s own values irrespective of what prevails in one’s social surroundings. But it is also the anaesthetic that dulls and deadens the burning fire of identity, of uniqueness and character, and renders individual people into random statistics, demographic units and atomized units of humanity suspended in a mist of anomie.

Observe our current society in the developed world: thanks to information technology we have tools at our disposal as individuals that can afford us enormous power to access the audience of the collective, that have brought the locus of information exchange and power transaction from distant authority to individual IP address. The implications of this for global evolution are profound and productive of vastly complex networks and social structures which can create enormous positive change to our common property – whether this be the noosphere or the atmosphere. And yet, we see epidemic rates of depression and prescription of psychotropic drugs, escapist leisure pursuits engaged in on a massive scale, such as internet role-playing games and virtual worlds, internet pornography and even the huge social networking phenomenon where individuals outcompete each other for how deeply integrated into the hive-mind they can become. What is going on here? I think we are suffering from the intense stress being placed on the individual to interact with the entire world on a daily basis, a stress which is really unprecedented. It is like our individual puny brains are being forced to plug into the vast database that is the planetary consciousness, but it is so extraordinarily powerful that it makes each of us nauseous with the neurological overload. As Neptune’s first cycle comes to a close, I think we are witnessing the evolution of a new commons, a shared world consciousness, a worldwide web of networked brains, similar to the mass of neuronal interconnections in each individual brain. And as Neptune conjoins Jupiter this time around, what is shared is a higher consciousness, a deeper, grander understanding of our moral imperatives, our path to future health and prosperity.

More than any time in recorded history, humanity is in a position where we have come face-to-face with an uncomfortable truth that unites us all and which is inescapable: our oceans and our atmosphere (those fluid Neptunian realms of chaotic maelstroms with their capacity for seemingly infinite dissolution) are our commons. Nobody can lay claim to them or any subtantial part of them, because any effort to delineate boundaries within them proves as futile as building a sandcastle and expecting it to last. As we intoxicate our oceans and atmosphere with carbon dioxide and watch the temperatures rise and the sea inundate our coasts, are we aware of how we are suffocating and anesthetising ourselves into oblivion with the noxious vapours of unchecked growth? As climate change advances at seemingly ever-accelerating pace, increasing numbers of people are realising that the only realistic way of getting any control over this runaway process is by declaring the commonality of ownership and responsibility for the atmosphere and oceans, and then implementing fair agreements on how much of these commons each person, and by extension, each nation-state can use. This will mean that people in some areas of the world will be able to use more than they have (and hence may continue to industrialise), whereas others will have to reduce their use (and hence contract their economic activity). There is no other means of approaching the problem of common property that is fairer than this.

Will this be a new form of socialism, where the nature of the common resource has changed from labour and capital (Saturnian in essence) to planet-wide regulators of our weather and preservers of life (Jupiterian in essence), which is what the atmosphere and oceans are? Or, should we abandon the term socialism and simply categorise such an ideological stance as yet another Aquarian instantiation of the redemptive longings of Neptune, one which, as we witness the final closure of the first complete cycle of this hypnotic phantasm, strangely yet fittingly echoes the collective concerns at the time of its discovery? Neptune is the force that calls us to dissolve into a greater and more powerful consciousness by purifying the essence of our intentions. But it is also the force that seduces us into mindless automatons of collective emotion. It is both our curse and our blessing to be perenially faced with the choice between these two modes of using this powerful force. With this Aquarian anniversary, perhaps we should distill from the reality of our collective circumstances a vision of a more evolved planetary consciousness, one which more clearly connects individuals to their collective responsibility, and which honours the planetary matrix for the single system that it is, decentralised and interconnected. We should not despair of making a difference in a world of such vastly diluted individual influence, for the behaviour of chaotic systems is such as to surprise us with the potential locked within even the smallest of changes. If we wish to preserve our commons, our environment that supports us, then we must start by changing our view of ourselves, no longer atomized and powerless in the face of the enormous waves of social change bearing down upon us; rather, informed, clear-sighted and united in love of truth, evolving within our networks and groups and forming the vanguard of a new movement as much committed to the ecological and holistic as to the egalitarian and just.

© Agent 37 of the Cosmic Intelligence Agency

The Neptune Return in 2009 - Part II

In the last segment of this series I discussed the role of Neptune in pointing us towards our capacity for self-deception and alluded to how an awareness of this tendency to be taken in by things that are too good to be true is the first step to spiritual growth. In this article I’d like to take a different approach to understanding the meaning of Neptune, one that examines the concept of loss and disappearance.

Looking back to the discovery of Neptune in September 1846, its conjunction with Saturn in many ways reflected the particular flavour of meaning that Neptune adopted amongst astrologers for the following decades. For it was the loss or disappearance of pain in the course of anaesthesia, and the loss or disappearance of suffering and the hard reality of social class in the course of socialism that defined the semantic boundaries of Neptune until relatively recently. And with these losses identity was dissolved, inasmuch as identity was built upon sensate bodily awareness or one’s achievements in the world of social exchange.

The conjunction with Saturn seemed to demand a physical manifestation of the ethereal (ether!), a real-world daguerrotype of the communion of souls hidden behind the veil of arbitrary physical and circumstantial difference. There was an insistent motive to make it real, bring it down to earth, cast it in stone and define it as it really is, ‘it’ being the true essence of spirit.

Conjoining Jupiter at the time of its return to its discovery degree, we can contemplate a similar loss and disappearance of trust in life, of all that is expected to be benevolent, just, morally righteous and humane. An erosion of confidence in the traditional figureheads of religious and ethical standards may be occurring, and we may feel that we have lost confidence in the arbiters of what is good and true. Most acutely we have seen the disappearance of enormous amounts of wealth as a system of artificial and purely speculative financial skulduggery has reached the limits of credibility and dissolved into thin air. Always with Neptune, we are challenged to turn inwards and question our own beliefs about the world and about what is truly essential in life. Many people are still unable to believe the reality of what has happened, what is happening, in the world today, the sheer scale of the duplicity and deception on the part of certain economists and financiers and their political henchmen. How could they get away with it? How are they still getting away with it? Confidence tricks are of course nothing new, but perhaps the scale of economic destruction currently unfolding is such as to demonstrate quite forcefully how damaging such criminal activities can be.

But in being confronted with such opportunistic greed and its destructive impacts worldwide I think we are situated at just one stage of a larger process of losing our moral bearings, entering a fog of confusion as to basic questions of justice and even doubting the common myth of human progress. Of ‘recovery’. We have been through bad patches before, recessions, downturns etc., we just need to set the rules straight again and things will eventually pull through and we can resume our ascent towards the stellar future of human expansion and growth, or so we have been told to think. And yet – we take a hard-nosed, perhaps uncomfortably objective and classically Aquarian look at ourselves and we see that we have multiplied like a bacterium in a Petri-dish, like a cancerous tumour that has consumed its host in the course of growth so voracious that nothing is safe from its exploitative machinations. Neptune’s conjunction with Jupiter (and Chiron) is, I think, symbolic of our need to dissolve our illusions of endless growth, to renounce the weed-like proliferation that the bottom-line of profit maximization demands. Ironically, Marx was probably right when he forecast the destruction of capitalism taken to its purest extremity, on the basis of its inherent instability, when he began to publish his socialist ideas exactly one Neptune cycle ago.

Neptune is representative of chaos: the chaos of systems that are deterministic but ultimately unpredictable, despite how alluring they may seem as candidates for predictive accuracy. Capitalism as a means of resource distribution and commercial justice is a chaotic system; even a cursory examination of stock-market charts and the hundreds of attempts to predict their fluctuations will attest to this. Weather is a chaotic system, which we can predict to a minimal extent, even with the most powerful computers on the planet, but here’s the rub: we take precautions against the weather and adapt to its vicissitudes with no ideological grumblings. But to regulate capitalist forces to as much as is possible prevent their damaging chaotic impositions on our lives seems to have been as taboo as capitalism itself was in communist dictatorships. Jupiter conjoining Neptune is symbolic of how we must more deeply understand the nature of chaos, and allow ourselves to jettison the notion of unending progress and profit in order to develop a more realistic (but inevitably more depressing and weighty) perspective on our collective predicament. This will mean sacrificing and losing our ‘growth fetish’ and re-fashioning economic theory to make it more sustainable and less profit-driven. Yes, there will be a huge vanishing of wealth, but in the final analysis such wealth is ephemeral and irrelevant to the health and maintenance of the matrix which nurtures us, our ecological context.

The inclusion of Chiron in this conjunction reflects the sense of having to cross a bridge in this process of changing perspectives. There is a necessity for a fundamental change of attitude, more than anything an acceptance of our mistakes, our human-ness, our rank stupidity and capacity to believe ridiculous notions which appeal to our narcissism and divest us of responsibility to life, to the greater life around us. More simply we are at a time when we must accept that we were wrong, that we got it wrong, again. We can try to get it right, but this will be impossible unless we develop the humility to admit to our mistakes. I also think Jupiter, when involved in any aspect pattern, especially a conjunction, tends to magnify things, to make them spectacular and larger-than-life. That the three bodies conjoin for a lengthy period in the second quarter of 2009 and Jupiter and Neptune conjoin 3 times, the last time for another lengthy period in the second half of 2010, suggests that this may really be a time for a new beginning in terms of our definition of progress and justice. And the conjunctions occurring in late Aquarius suggests that this new beginning will again, as occurred at the time Neptune was discovered, centrally involve the relationships between men and women and the society of which they form a part. My intuition is that this will be the most important positive and natural, free-flowing energy of the coming two years, the one that we can most easily build on and nurture to a new vision of the world. Coincident with the upcoming Uranus-Pluto square, which is almost within orb as I write, together with the cardinal climax of 2010, it will be this background change in ideology with respect to social justice and collective values that will frame the battles and struggles of the coming decade.

© Agent 37 of the Cosmic Intelligence Agency

The Neptune Return in 2009 – Part I

Between April and July 2009, Neptune will twice cross the degree of its initial discovery at 25 degrees Aquarius – this is its first return to this degree since September 1846. Neptune will have finally encompassed the entire zodiac and as we approach this moment in the near future we can look back and perhaps grasp the meaning of Neptune with a sense of completeness that we have heretofore lacked. When Neptune was discovered, it was closely conjunct Saturn, almost as though its recondite and vague nature required the disciplined measurement and definition of Saturn to bring it to human awareness. How interesting, then, that at the time of its first return since then, it is closely conjoined by Jupiter and Chiron. What can we deduce from this symbolism and how can we apply this to current and future events in the world?

Let us first say something about Neptune’s discovery. This has been described in detail elsewhere and will not be repeated in detail. Suffice to say that it seems to have been discovered independently by a number of different astronomers in Europe who subsequently entered a dispute about who should be seen as the original true discoverer. Even at its very birth into collective awareness, this planetary archetype was steeped in confusion and a deceptive fog that seemed to erode the scientific objectivity of the protagonists.

The events that coincided or immediately followed the discovery of Neptune have been well-documented. The first general anaesthetic, ether, was discovered in the same year, and Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto was published 2 years later. The romantic movement in art and literature was at its peak, and within 10-20 years the spiritualist and theosophical movements were on the rise throughout the world.

With Neptune conjoining Jupiter and Chiron in April and May 2009, we have a chance to re-evaluate the meaning behind this mystery planet. When it was conjunct Saturn, we discovered how to dissolve the pain and material barriers of reality; conjunct Jupiter and Chiron perhaps we see ourselves dissolving our sense of progress, of hope, of opportunity. We are arriving at a time when we will be forced to transcend the ideology of endless growth, of expansion of wealth, of capitalist exploitation of resources, and we will be confronted with the unreality of prevailing ideas of progress. This will hurt, and we will feel deceived. We may feel quite angry and perhaps caught up in something that we didn’t really ever fully buy into, but which has recoiled into our faces. Neptune tells us how we are deceived, fooled into believing something that is false, because deep down we would rather the comforting allure of promised bliss than the depressing reality of pain and suffering. Casting our eyes back one whole Neptune cycle, we can see how ideology and dreams of utopia have dominated the major cultural, economic and geopolitical shifts of the past 165 years. And with Neptune having been discovered in Aquarius, the sign most associated with radical ideas for group evolution, it is not all that surprising how the main ideological current dating from the time of its discovery has been socialism and its more extreme form, communism (as well as political movements that have defined themselves as the antitheses of these ideologies). On a deeper level, then, I feel we are witnessing a collective sense of shame or regret over how easily we have allowed ourselves to be fooled yet again by unrealistic and unsustainable ideas about how we relate to each other economically and politically. There is a sense of ‘how did it come to this?’ or ‘how have we been so stupid to allow things to get this bad?’ But this is Neptune’s blessing: by being deceived we see how we can be so deceptive ourselves, we see how blindly we wish to place our faith in ideologies and abrogate responsibility for ever-vigilant awareness of the moral value within our relationships.

I think concepts of wealth and progress and opportunity and broadening of horizons will come to resemble a painfully distant fantastical dream, a paradise lost, a guilt-ridden hangover of global proportions, and this will by implication become a fertile time for the emergence of cultic figures who promise deliverance and redemption for our sins. Neptune has only just completed its first cycle and we have now found ourselves questioning the truth behind much of what we trusted as real: the democratic process, the meritocracy of a capitalist market economy, the unending progress of scientific rationalism and technological solutions. When it really comes down to brass tacks, where have these bastions of Aquarian egalitarianism and freedom of intellectual endeavour really taken us? Are we really more free now than before? Does our vote really matter any more? Is it not apparent that we are governed more than ever by an arrogant and spiritually ignorant elite that perpetuates its own privilege at the expense of the collective? At the expense of future generations? Aquarius is supposed to champion consideration of the views of all, irrespective of their popularity, yet today we see more homogeneity in political views than has ever existed in modern times. Everyone seems to have come to a consensus about the most important and fundamental questions of political justice: allocation of resources, relations between labour and capital, the role of religious belief in cultural life and its trumping by a disenchanted amoral scientism founded on human meaninglessness. Which is strange, because this is not characteristic of fecund political activity and debate; this resembles a zombified, comatose population who do not believe in anything at all, and who are thereby neutered of political power and freedom of choice. How can there exist freedom of choice when there are no alternatives from which to choose?

We astrologers associate hopes and ideals with the eleventh house and perhaps by extension, with Aquarius. We have heard a lot about hope in recent years, so much so that it has become a meme in itself, a political slogan, a catch-all term to sum up the promise of deliverance by one man, from the iniquitous pit of political criminality into which our world has descended. Hope has, I think, been ‘Neptunized’ – it has been glamourized, rendered numinous and holy, a sacred virtue of the true believer. In the real world, the world of shortages, lay-offs and corporate crime of staggering proportions, of Anglo-American-Israeli genocide in South-West Asia, of ecological crisis and rapidly declining resources, we do not need hope, we need action. To merely hope is to await those who will act to take action, yet presuming that we are incapable of our own action. To merely hope is to wilfully accept our own political paralysis, to deny our own responsibility to set things right starting with our own spheres of influence. Hope as fashionably utilized in recent political discourse is a palliative, a temporary soporific that saps us of our mettle and our courage to fight for justice. We know from experience how Neptune is not satisfied with mere concrete reality; how much more interesting to invest our own ideals of justice and moral rectitude in people who we can then tear apart with Dionysian fervour when they fail to deliver us the Promised Land.

Neptune, discovered with Saturn in conjunction, needs us to take responsibility for our own dreams, our own escapist pursuits, our own spiritual development, and our own addictions. We all have them, but we must learn to keep them from becoming too loose, too readily mixed up and confused with those of others. Above all, we need to stop returning to childhood fantasies of the perfect parent who just ‘knows’ what we need and will deliver us from our pain. Because he won’t. Because he can’t. Because this pain is as necessary as it is inevitable. It is the pain of spiritual, not material, growth.

© Agent 37

The Election of Barack Obama as U.S. President

The success of Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election has caused the world to notice that some major changes are afoot. Astrologically, it certainly seems appropriate that the first multiracial American president, brought up in different parts of the globe, has been elected on the very day of the exact first pass of the Saturn-Uranus opposition.

In this essay I wish to take a closer look at this opposition, its involvement in the 2010 cardinal t-square and at what these alignments may mean in the context of Mr Obama’s election. To begin with, I would like to examine the essential difference between an opposition and a conjunction. During a conjunction, there is a fusion of energies, of themes, of archetypes. In the case of a Saturn-Uranus conjunction, contraction or collapse occurs as weight suddenly loses its supports, there is a very clear, definite termination of a process, or a reversal of a process into its opposite. Saturn contributes realistic outcomes to a Uranian process of reform; Uranus innovates what has become impractical and useless, cutting free from established norms if necessary. The most recent example of a Saturn-Uranus conjunction in modern history is that which occurred in 1988 (13 February 1988, 26 June 1988 and 18 October 1988). This occurred during the final years of the political end-game of the former Soviet Union, with President Mikhael Gorbachev’s political reforms of the USSR including glasnost (openness) and perestroika (new thinking or restructuring). The actual fall of the Berlin Wall and the remainder of the revolutions in Eastern Europe that followed in subsequent years occurred during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 1989 and the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993. We see here an almost universal recognition that a new beginning must be made, that something very old and dying must be allowed to pass into history, that a new dispensation is being brought into being and it is unstoppable, natural and singular in its focus.

However, the opposition has a different feel to it. At the time of the opposition, two different archetypal forces oppose each other, which means they represent two opposite ends of a spectrum of possibilities. Of course, they always represent two opposite ends of a spectrum, but at the time of an opposition of the planets representative of these energies, there is a tendency to mistake one end for the other, or to identify with one end at the total exclusion of the other. I suppose one might say that the tendency is to be extreme in one’s rejection of one end of the spectrum, but also in one’s espousal of the other end.

So with the current Saturn-Uranus opposition, people are radically aligned with either a spirit of change for change’s sake, irrespective of the reality on the ground, or they are trenchantly insistent that nothing has changed, nothing will change, that things are the same old boring reality that they have always been. So while there is certainly a feeling of change in the air, and certainly a tremendous restlessness, there is a certain exaggerated quality to this, it seems to be an over-reaction, somewhat divorced from the underlying real events that are taking place. And, in a sort of holographic replication of the same dilemma as we examine smaller and smaller entities in the world during this period of history, we can continue to observe the opposite archetypal energies composing the ambient state of nature: in the U.S. election, on the side of Saturn, represented by Republican John McCain, a man in his seventies, we also had a dash of Uranus, in the inexperienced and somewhat off-centre female vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin. Equally, the victorious Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, representative of Uranus, with his racial heritage and young age, as well as brilliant oratorical skills and political genius, paired up with a rather Saturnian figure of Joseph Biden, in his sixties, with plenty of previous political experience.

In a sense it is at the time of this opposition that we become conscious of how we can lose our sense of boldness in demanding change for the better, for fear of losing the structures that we depend on to define our reality, or, we can lose our sense of reality altogether by throwing all our faith in new projects without examining them properly. And I can’t help but wonder if this is exactly what has happened on 4 November 2008. Mr Obama has been lionized, idealised, almost worshipped by masses of people who are willing to forget the realities of their current predicament, and the predicament of their lifestyles and their national economy, so long as the President has changed race. Economic, ecological and political conditions continue to deteriorate with increasing rapidity, yet Mr Obama has said very little about how he intends to grapple with these. To be fair, he has not yet been inaugurated and it is too early to judge his record. Nevertheless, for true change to occur at the time of a Saturn-Uranus opposition, it needs to amount to more than symbolic change, for the Uranian element must be balanced by some Saturnian hard work, realism, perspicacity and gravitas. Hopefully Mr Obama will demonstrate that he has these qualities and can use them for the public good.

This opposition makes 5 exact passes between now and July 2010, and the last of these occurs across the cardinal points of 0º Aries / 0º Libra, contributing to the powerful cardinal t-square alignment of mid-2010. This t-square alignment will be focussed on the missing point of what would otherwise be a grand cross, 0-3º Cancer. Horoscopes with significant points in this part of the zodiac will be greatly caught up in the turmoil of what will be happening only 20 months from now. Mr Obama’s Venus is placed at 1º48’ Cancer, and it seems it is his very image, his skin-colour, all the values that he represents and that people project onto him, that will be a crucial focus of the crisis that is coming in the next few years. In more cynical moments, I fear that he will be used to sell something very dark, very powerful and very destructive, and that his extraordinary charm and beauty of character and presentation will assist in the process. More optimistically, perhaps his very multiracial identity will serve as a symbol of peace and co-operation which will help inspire a true revolution of our social and community structures, values and our shared capital.

Mr Obama’s Venus itself is conjunct Uranus in the chart for the U.S. that I have been exploring recently, that for the Yorktown Surrender (17 October 1781, 10am, Yorktown, Virginia, USA). Uranus is at 2º52’ Cancer in this chart, and will also be centrally involved in the 2010 cardinal t-square. I have written about the symbolism behind Uranus in this horoscope in a previous blog entry: placed in the eighth house, it seems to be associated with the evolution of the financial core of the U.S. economic system, with innovations in corporate law, with increasingly instrumental manipulations of the dollar, with globalization and international trade and even with the lucrative trade in African slaves. As we currently read obituaries to market capitalism following the implosion of the derivatives markets and ponder the possibilities of another New Deal to help with the mess, we witness yet more of the Uranian quality of American capitalist elitism and ruthless exploitation of the people in a $700 billion bailout to banking corporations, with no regulatory controls attached. This is nothing other than theft, of breathtaking scale, right in the precincts of government, and which the majority of Americans opposed in opinion polls. This is the dark side of Uranian energy, utterly refusing to be fettered in any way, shape or form, completely unregulated, but devastating in its ruthlessness, inhumanity and callousness. And it is this Uranus that will be at the cross-hairs of the 2010 alignment, with Mr Obama’s Venus in the same position: will he sweeten the deal, will he sugar-coat the bitter pill of austerity, or will he radically reform and co-opt the power of the U.S. oligarchs and corporatists, forcing a new economic policy on a more fair and pro-social platform? This is one of the burning questions that will be considered over the coming months.

The cardinal t-square is in my view the most significant and exact alignment that we will be facing since the conjunctions of 1988 and 1989 (with the Jupiter opposition in November 1989). Assuming he survives until then, it will be the defining moment in Mr Obama’s presidency. Prior to that time, the other very significant alignment which will key into Mr Obama’s horoscope is the Jupiter/Chiron/Neptune conjunction at 26º Aquarius, opposite his own natal Uranus at 25º Leo, which occurs in April/May 2009. This may be a time when we get to see how much of his ‘change’ we can actually believe in, and also how deeply and creatively he can embody the popular yearnings for optimism in a time of ecological and spiritual pain. We see intimations of genius in this man – this seems to a be a worldwide impression, not only within the borders of the U.S., judging by the popular media and reactions to his election as President. Hopefully by April/May 2009 we will begin to get a sense of how he will use this genius, and for what ends.

At the time of his inauguration as 44th U.S. President on 20 January 2009 at 12 noon in Washington, D.C., his Saturn will be sitting on the M.C., the Sun and Mercury will be transiting conjunct his Jupiter, he will be only days past his 4th Jupiter return, and Pluto will be opposing his Venus - this certainly speaks of the success of a man of coloured skin in achieving the top political job in the world, and perhaps in these transits it is appropriate to see how his Venus, conjunct the U.S. Uranus in Cancer behind it, represents his racial appearance, but also a defining moment in American and world history when we can start to see an end to racial discrimination, the commodification of human beings that is inherent in it, and the reshaping of a world community that has reawakened to the unity of our ancestral past and the common burdens of our planetary future.

© A37
Nov. 2008

Economic Woes for the USA

Many words have been written on the subject of the ‘correct’ horoscope for the USA. Given the contemporary dominance of the USA in the cultural, economic and political life of the world, it is not unreasonable that astrologers have spent long hours poring over the various candidate charts for a national horoscope. Probably the most commonly used charts are those timed for various moments on 4 July 1776, which was apparently the day on which the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia. A Gemini-rising chart cast for the very early hours of the morning, a Scorpio-rising chart for early afternoon and the famous ‘Sibly chart’ with a Sagittarius ascendant have all been utilised extensively. Other possibilities include the chart for the First Continental Congress (5 September 1774 at 10am, Philadelphia), the Battle of Lexington (19 April 1775 at 5am, Lexington, Massachusetts), the signing of the Treaty of Paris (3 September 1783 at 10:30am, in Paris, France) or the adoption of the Federal Constitution (17 September 1787 at 4pm, in Philadelphia).

In this article, I wish to propose a case for the radicality of the chart of the surrender of British General Cornwallis to the American revolutionary forces at the Battle of Yorktown, which defined the end of the American Revolutionary War and essentially de-facto independence of the USA from Britain. The chart is set for 10am on 17 October 1781, at Yorktown, Viriginia. Further, I want to utilise this chart to examine some of the trends in US financial history which set the stage for the current problems besetting the US and world economy, and which have huge implications for the world over the next 2-3 years, irrespective of who wins the upcoming presidential election.

This chart’s basic structure can be summarised as follows. Probably the most striking feature is the new moon in the Libran eleventh house, conjunct the South Node, which indicates that the chart followed a total solar eclipse which occurred 6 hours and 10 minutes earlier. 10º Sagittarius rises, with Saturn following at 16º Sagittarius. There is a Venus/Jupiter conjunction within 1º16 of orb on the cusp of the first house, with Jupiter in very late Scorpio and Venus across the cusp in very early Sagittarius. There is a rather ominous-looking Mars/Pluto conjunction in Aquarius, and Mars closely trines Neptune. Uranus is in early Cancer in the eighth house.

Saturn rising in Sagittarius is suggestive of the religious fundmentalism and Christian moral conservatism espoused by the majority of American citizens; we see here an image of the bulwark of enlightenment and humanistic ideals of freedom, happiness, prosperity, justice and moral rectitude. Being in detriment, Saturn’s weakness is seen in the extremes of religious and moral hypocrisy evident in popular opinions on issues such as the death penalty, the teaching of evolutionary theory, provision of universal health-care and the widening disparity between rich and poor. This is a very traditional image of the shining beacon of democracy, the guarantor of liberty and self-determination.

Although Saturn is close to the Ascendant, we must not overlook Venus, tucked into the very first degree of Sagittarius, which by the whole-sign house system, is therefore in the very first degree of the first house. Venus is also conjunct (though out-of-sign) Jupiter, kind of adding to the Sagittarian flavour of Venus. I think this represents the prevailing image of America – big, brash, fond of risk, entertainment, wealth, gambling, horses, expansion, conquest, international adventure. But also, devoted to pursuing happiness and striving for the freedom to do so, even if this means acquiring enormously disproportionate extremes of material resources and money. I think this Venus-Jupiter conjunction straddling the first house cusp indicates the tendency of America to see itself as fundamentally benign and indeed blessed, particularly with Jupiter being in the twelfth house. There may be a tendency to confuse the strong fantasy of blessed exceptionalism with the reality on the ground, with inconvenient socio-economic data failing to generate attention because it doesn’t fit with the shiny, happy face of the American dream.

Mars and Pluto conjoin closely in early Aquarius, in the third house of transport, communications, intelligence services and early education. Note that Pluto in this chart is exactly stationary, going direct. This is an image of the obsession of the US with violence, particularly gratuitous and shocking violence, as well as the dominating strength of the US military machine. Violence and individual rights (Mars in Aquarius) combine in the liberal gun laws in the US, where the individual’s right to bear arms against a dicatatorial monarchy has retained its place at the very core of American identity and civic status. Weaponry is futuristic, utilising the most modern technologies, as well as consisting of a large nuclear stockpile. But a very important part of the USA’s offensive capabilities, particularly since the end of the Second World War, consists of the work of intelligence agencies such as the CIA. Utilising networks of intelligence operatives across the world, the USA has unrivalled ability to manipulate in the affairs of other nation-states and foment suitable political crises to assist it in its geopolitical aims.

Note the vey close trine from Mars to Neptune, which I think is the fetishization of military life, the inculcation of seductive imagery of bravery and heroism via media and education. The USA is truly a militarised culture, based very deeply on the values of the Western: personal bravery, rugged individualism, fighting the good fight, respect and admiration for the outlaw. This aspect also relates to the slightly grandiose over-glamourisation of the military life, the action movies churned out by Hollywood, the shoot-‘em-up computer games, the contrast between the fantasy of gun-toting heroes being welcomed as liberators and the reality of human misery and cruelty unleashed by the controllers of the state. Mars-Neptune is also helpful for espionage and undermining enemies as opposed to more direct force.

The Libran eclipse New Moon in the eleventh house is to my mind the epitome of classical civilised democratic government, complete with checks and balances and a strong congressional component representative of the people and the component states. Even the most important central public government buildings throughout the US are built in neo-classical architectural style, suggestive of the institutions of Greece and Rome. I think a New Moon carries the mundane symbolism of the marriage of the people with their rulers, and with the Moon eclipsing the Sun, the monarchical rulership has indeed been overthrown by popular revolt.

However, with the MC being in the Virgoan tenth house, Mercury, placed in Scorpio in the twelfth, takes the role of the executive branch of government, tensely placed square the rather belligerent Mars. Despite the checks and balances of the constitution, the reality is that the President ends up rather isolated and placed on a pedestal as the idealised leader who makes the tricky and difficult decisions, often decisions related to warfare and defence. Sometimes this has not been so successful, as for example at the onset of the Civil War in the early 1860s, when transiting Pluto in Taurus opposed Mercury, and the country split into the Union and the Confederacy for a 4-year period of blood-letting.

Given the upcoming election, together with the prevailing economic vicissitudes affecting the US economy, it is useful to have a closer examination of the placement of Uranus in this horoscope. Uranus is placed in the eighth house, the house of financial deals, foreign trade, taxation, corporations and national experiences of death and loss. From early in the history of the USA, one of the most lucrative forms of financial activity and trade was that involving Africans, brought to the USA as slaves, and this persisted through much of the nineteenth century, and, some would say, on into the twentieth and twenty-first, albeit in a less overt form. We can see this symbolically reflected in the placement of Uranus in Cancer, the sign of race, clan and birthright. We also see here the mass killings of native Americans across the continent during the years of expansion of the USA in the nineteenth century.

In early 1886, the US Supreme Court argued and decided upon the famous case of Santa Clara County –v- Southern Pacific Railroad which was to grant corporations the same legal rights as juristic persons under the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, i.e. the rights of citizenship. Transiting Saturn was conjunct natal Uranus, and a transiting Jupiter-Uranus conjunction was square natal Uranus. This was a crucial development in the growing power of corporate America, which seems to be reflected by this Uranus placement in the US horoscope. (The Fourteenth Amendment itself, passed in 1866, explicitly described the rights of citizenship and, controversially at the time, extended citizenship to slaves. At this time, transiting Uranus was conjunct natal Uranus.)

In 1914, when the transiting Saturn-Pluto conjunction was exactly conjunct natal Uranus, the Federal Reserve was formed, a private corporation which was given the role of loaning money at interest to the US Federal Government. This was a major step towards handing over financial sovereignty of the American people to a private interest, and was the final result of a long process of lobbying and persuading politicians on the part of international banking interests. Note that transiting Neptune was trine natal Venus, the symbol of the US dollar, at this time.

On 6 April 1917, following on the sinking of the Lusitania by German U-boats, and the disruption to US-European trade by the war in Europe, a reluctant President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany, with only one more year to go until the end of the conflict. Transiting Pluto was conjunct natal Uranus.

In late 1929, and early 1930, as economic depression hit the USA following the Wall Street Crash, transiting Saturn was opposite US Uranus, and progressed Moon and Venus, conjunct in early Aries, were squaring Uranus.

Towards the end of the Second World War it was apparent that the tide was turning against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) and that a new system of international financial regulation would have to be set up in the wake of the economic depression and devastation caused by the war. The major non-Axis powers met at Bretton Woods in New England in the first three weeks of July 1944 to settle on a new post-war economic dispensation, as transiting Saturn conjoined US Uranus.

In the early 1970s, interesting events took place regarding the international economic connections and climate in which the USA was operating. On 15 August 1971, resident Nixon ‘floated’ the US dollar, taking it off the gold standard, which effectively turned it into a fiat currency, declared to have a given value by decree. It was no longer exactly exchangeable for a given amount of gold. Transiting Neptune was exactly conjunct Venus (the dollar was ‘floated’), and transiting Pluto was sextile Jupiter. Towards the end of 1973, following on US support of the Israelis in the Yom Kippur War, as well as the depreciating value of the US dollar as a result of the removal of the gold standard, Arab oil-producing countries imposed an embargo on oil exports to the West, resulting the first Oil Crisis. Transiting Saturn was conjunct Uranus and transiting Uranus was conjunct the US Sun. Transiting Pluto was also conjunct US Neptune. Note also, that earlier that year, the World Trade Centre was officially opened on 4 April 1973, when transiting Pluto was exactly square US Uranus.

Transiting Uranus opposed natal Uranus in November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and a whole new expanse of the geopolitical map was ripe for economic development and trade, as the old communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed. This was enunciated by President Bush in 1990 as a ‘New World Order’ ready for the forces of globalization rooted in the Western capitalist corporate economic model. During the presidency of the younger President George W Bush, the events of 11 September 2001 took the US on a strange new trajectory in terms of the fundamentals of its economic system. Following the devastation of the World Trade Centre on that day, as transiting Mars opposed the US Uranus, and the transiting lunar nodes straddled it, the large stores of gold that were kept in the vaults beneath the World Trade Centre were shipped out under federal security in the course of the removal of the debris of the disaster; none of this has been accounted for since. The day before, 10 September 2001, the then US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, declared that there was a $2.3 trillion discrepancy in the accounts of the Pentagon – following the disaster the next day, this was never followed up or investigated.

The current economic problems besetting the USA are in my view probably the most serious in the history of the country. Earlier this year, and most exactly next year and in 2010, the US Uranus will be opposed by transiting Pluto, and squared by the transiting Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, all culminating at the cardinal climax in mid-2010. I predict that this will involve a radical devaluation of the US dollar, a serious economic depression and most likely severe social and political turmoil in the US as the leadership attempts to maintain control in an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable situation. This may also coincide with the decision by China, Russia and other foreign holders of US bonds to dump their holdings and make a call on the debts owed them by the USA. This would be extremely serious and could well escalate into a major international crisis as the world tries to collectively intervene to sort out the mess that the US economy and national entity has become.